Slet 1988

74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević moves through socialist-modernist spaces, her body echoing Yugoslavia’s last mass performance. Intertwined with a teenage girl’s diary from 1988 (at the time of the protests that would later lead to the breakup of Yugoslavia), the film traces the shift from socialist collectivism to rising nationalism.

Marta Popivoda’s Slet 1988, explores the intimate and collective echoes of a watershed moment: the end of Yugoslavia and the socialist utopia. Far from an unequivocally nostalgic approach, the film’s multiple layers weave a sensitive and reflective dialogue between past and present. At the heart of this exploration are archival images of the mass spectacle ‘Slet’, a Youth Day celebration held in Belgrade in 1988. The thousands of torches from this parade that light up the screen are followed, in the present, by a body in training. In a series of close-ups, the camera scrutinises the woman who was once surrounded by 4,000 young people, at the centre of the show. Lonely but resilient, the dancer Sonja Vukićević, now 74 years old, moves among the modernist buildings of the socialist era. The urban landscape, beautifully framed, bears the mark of a political project, as do the bodies that participated in the ‘Slet’. The last performance of its kind before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the outbreak of bloody nationalist wars and the country’s breakup, this collective and monumental performance aspired to embody the socialist ideal. 

These two strands are further intertwined with the diary entries of a teenage girl from 1988, which already reveal a sense of confusion and uncertainty about the future. These presences resonate as the film depicts the upheaval of an era and the lingering repercussions of its wounds. How does ideology inscribe itself in space and on bodies and imaginations? 

Nepheli Gambade